


The Old Lie

by Owl_by_Night



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 04:16:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21385948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owl_by_Night/pseuds/Owl_by_Night
Summary: Arthur, after the first world war, finds that his memories will not let him be.
Relationships: Kitty Pakenham/Arthur Wellesley 1st Duke of Wellington, William De Lancey/Arthur Wellesley 1st Duke of Wellington
Kudos: 12





	The Old Lie

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote a WW2 AU for the peninsulads but when I was writing it, I sometimes thought about what would have happened to them during the first world war. As a warning, this is very sad fic - this war does not go so well for them and the fate of the soldiers was influenced by canon. The fic deals with the aftermath of the war and contains major character death, serious injury, trauma, the impact of war on soldiers' relationships and period typical attitudes to shell shock.
> 
> Title is from Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est.

Kitty won't stop talking at him. Petty, irritating comments about domestic trivialities: the new maid, the boys growing (as if boys did anything else), her plans for tea. He snaps at her to be quiet and she looks so meek and frightened that he ought to be ashamed of himself. Instead it irritates him even more. She has no more understanding of what’s on his mind than the damn dog snoring away on the hearth rug. She doesn't know he can smell the chlorine stink of gas and taste mud at the back of his throat. That the clatter from the kitchen and the thud of the boys’ feet upstairs sounds like gunfire. 

Kitty puts down her sewing and goes up to the boys to send them outside to play even though he hasn’t asked her to. He can hear her telling them to be quiet, that Papa has been visiting his friend from the army and it makes him tired. Tired! Bloody typical of her, fussing about and making it worse. He slams the newspaper down on the table in frustration. He doesn't want to hear her excuses. 

He doesn't want to hear that visiting Grant makes it worse. He can't let himself question whether he should go. Sitting for an hour and more in those dismal lodgings making trivial conversation while Grant coughs what is left of his life away with gas damaged lungs, half blinded, feeling abandoned by the army he gave everything for. Of course Arthur has to go. What's an hour of his time compared to a life narrowed down to four walls and never being able to breathe freely? Some sacrifice. 

He tries to keep contact with his men where it's wanted, to make amends. He buys Henry a drink now and then, asks about the children, avoids looking too often at the empty sleeve of his coat. He doesn't visit Strange of course. Too upsetting for him, the matron had said after the second attempt. He was better without visitors to disturb him. As if he were an unruly child. 

Arthur can't believe that it was cowardice that made Strange mad. Shell shock affected a lot of good men, although Strange is worse than most. Left in no man's land for too long, too badly wounded to walk, he'd come out seeing men who weren't there, convinced he'd been cursed. He still talks to people unseen. Dead men, probably. Poor bastard. Arthur wishes he could forget the sight of him, huddled in his dressing gown with unkempt hair, calling for his wife. He'd prefer to remember him as he was: the man in smart uniform, the cleverest man under his command, always to be relied upon. Strange is one of the men that Arthur wishes he’d known before the trenches because then he would remember him as he was, as he should have been, without reliving all that time he wants forgotten. All that death and all that fear. It was only afterwards that he could admit he’d been afraid. That he’d been a coward himself and that now the fear still chokes him when he thinks of it. 

Inevitably those unwanted memories are the most frequently revisited. 

On the worst days it's always William. He'd been Arthur's right hand at the front: quick and efficient and cheerful with it. The sort of second in command you dreamed of getting. The best man he'd ever had the pleasure of serving with. And more. Oh how much more William had been to him than that dry line of official approbation in dispatches. He remembers the press of William's body against his own. That sweet and frantic kiss that had been somehow more significant than any night of intimacy with his wife, a single point of brightness in the dark. 

Arthur had still given the order that sent him out to die. 

Poor William. If he'd been less brave, Arthur might have changed his mind. He might have let himself waver, if there had been any sign of William asking not to go. 

William had not asked. He had only smiled, and gone with all apparent courage to be slaughtered no more than a few feet from the edge of the trench. They had had to cut him down from the wire when the fighting stopped. Arthur had seen him then, one last time. He wonders, sometimes, if part of him died too that day, looking at that pale face. He'd tried to smooth the hair over William's forehead where his helmet had fallen and left a streak of mud against his skin. 

He hadn't felt the loss. Not then, not immediately. All his thoughts had been a dull, heavy repetition of the same phrase: why am I still alive? He thinks it still. In the night, in the mornings and on long, dull Sunday afternoons. Why is he still alive? Why, of all of them, should he be the one to go home with hardly a scratch? 

"I'm sorry, I just came to fetch..." Kitty stops, hovering on the threshold of the sitting room and Arthur realises with horror that his cheeks are wet. She takes a step forward. 

"Don't!" He reaches for anger, far easier than an explanation, then checks himself. "Don't." His voice cracks. He doesn't wipe his eyes. To do so would be to acknowledge the reason he needs to. 

Kitty, initially frozen at his command, closes the door quietly behind her. With a purpose he doesn't expect of her, she walks towards him and wraps her arm about his shoulder. When he doesn't pull away, she draws him closer until his head rests against her sensible white blouse. He can smell lavender water and soap, so different to the smell of death he has been reliving. 

He sobs, pressing his face close to her as if he were one of their sons. Perhaps she is used to this, as a mother. Perhaps his vulnerability gives her strength. She holds him and rocks him and does not let him push her away. Afterwards she even wipes his face for him like a child, perched on the edge of the table and leaning down to pass her little embroidered handkerchief over his cheeks as if it were not ridiculous, as if he did not have a perfectly serviceable handkerchief of his own. He lets her do it. 

"You can tell me," she says gently, and her softness now does not hurt him as it did. ”I’d like to understand, if you can." 

"No, I can't, not now..." He shuts his eyes and shakes his head. He cannot, cannot let the words out. 

"It doesn't have to be today," she says. "Any day. Whenever you want." 

She takes his hand in hers and squeezes it until he meets her eyes again. She seems different to him like this and he feels a faint echo of what he felt when they first married, before anyone even thought of war. 

"Come now," she says, "go and wash your face. The boys are outside playing and it's a lovely Sunday afternoon. We'll go for a walk."

Alone upstairs he follows her orders, splashing water from the jug to wash his face. Somewhere a door bangs. Just the children, he says to his reflection, just an ordinary sound. The man in the mirror looks less like a soldier now. More like the man the world expects him to be. He wonders what William would think of him: what might have been… 

"Enough," he tells himself sternly. "No good comes of might have been."


End file.
